


This Season Will Never Grow Old

by strixus



Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: Christmas, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-28
Updated: 2009-12-28
Packaged: 2017-10-05 08:59:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/39957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strixus/pseuds/strixus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Duo copes with Christmas after the second war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Season Will Never Grow Old

**Author's Note:**

> Christmas fic, written for the Gundam Wing Fanfiction Forum - Christmas 99.  
> Song by Rita MacNeil

It was nearly two in the morning, on a clear, frosty December night, somewhere in what had once been Iowa. The corn had been harvested in early November, leaving the earth barren and turned, filled with the roots of the corn stalks that had filled the fields with waves of green and gold during the high point of summer. Frost had hardened the black earth of the fields, rendering the great expanse seemingly empty and lifeless, all except for a single point of light, far in the middle of the field.

Amid the fallow fields, a two story farm house stood amid a cluster of trees, shouldering close to a low slung cattle barn and a pair of silos like a group of hoboes huddling to hide from the cold. The paint was pealing, cracked by frost of winter and baking heat of summer, a graying white luminous in the cold, bluish moonlight. All the windows were dark, touched by frost around the sill of each, except for one on the bottom floor, near the back of the house. This single, small window glowed with a soft, yellowish white light, illuminating the frost on the glass, casting a rhombus of light out into the frozen glass below it. And silhouetted in the window by the flickering yellow white light was a slim figure seated inside the room, just even with the window. The figure was Duo Maxwell.

Duo supposed he had been granted with the greatest possible curse: a love of literature and a voracious appetite for it. He was currently bent over a very dog-eared and battered paperback of around a thousand pages, about half way through its thickness. His light came from a small silver candleholder with a single, long white taper candle in it, its flickering glow his preferred reading light. He was reading to keep from going to sleep, though he needed the sleep, he would rather read. Reading was far more enjoyable.

He hated this time of year, hated the cold and the damp that clung to the bones. But he especially hated it because it was, of course, the holiday season. And those holidays reminded him of far too many things he wanted to forget. That's why he was reading, not sleeping, as Quatre and Trowa were upstairs.

Suddenly painfully aware of the quiet, Duo closed the book, dog-earing the page he had stopped on, and got up out of the chair by the window. He walked over across the darkened back living room of the farmhouse, and turned on the radio. By the time he had sat down, and picked back up the book, a song had started playing. Duo put down the book, and listened.

 

Christmas is coming, I can tell by the smiles  
I remember the snowflakes that fell from the sky  
And covered the village that lay sleeping below  
Thank goodness this season will never grow old

Duo sighed. It had been - what - two years since the war's end, and he had been traveling non-stop since then, over the world and through the colonies. He had traveled at first to see this world, this place he had fought to protect from its self, and see all the works of man. That's what he had told himself at least. Then it had happened one night, in a small café in the train station in Budapest. He had been sitting, eating a cheap dinner on the rail platform, watching the ebb and flow of humanity through the station. It had just happened, a wave of shear loneliness and pain had overcome him, and he found himself crying into his bowl of lamb stew. He wanted to go home.

And he had realized the impossibility of that want, and realized the futility of even wanting it. But those thoughts had not changed that need he felt. And he had realized what it was that he needed, really. Not home, not that thing he had never known, he didn't need that: but to see them again. The other pilots, scattered on the winds over the earth and through space. He had to find them, to see them again. Stoic Trowa, passionate Quatre, roguish Wufei, and even, yes even Heero.

He had thought the search useless, though he had continued it for a year, until just 2 months ago when he had finally found Trowa and Quatre, here in the cornfields of Iowa. Two long years, this the second December since the war had come to its bitter end. And he had been wandering, all but homeless for all that time, looking for Heero, looking for the other pilots since they had all gone their own ways. And here he was.

The brilliance of the moon outside had begun to fade, clouds moving in along a front. A chill wind played with the fruit trees outside the window, like a child playing at pulling wings off a fly. Duo shivered; though the house was warm, he could almost feel the cold wind, caring what he knew would be the smell of snow.

 

I look through my window well into the night  
Watching and waiting and hoping I might  
See one little reindeer fly through the snow  
Thank goodness the season will never grow old

Duo turned away from the window, tired of the bleakness of the harvested fields crusted with frost frozen soil. He picked back up his book, and looked at the page he had stopped on. He looked at it for a few minutes, not reading, but lost in thought again. He sighed, and put the book back down on the windowsill.

Trowa and Quatre had moved to this house around the same time Duo had been in Paris, about five months before his episode in Budapest, and the property for about two miles in every direction was in the Winner name. It was all cornfields, except for a single field of alfalfa used for feed for the two horses, five cows, and herd of sheep, and pasture used in the summer for the animals, and the land was flat and fertile. The farm was virtually self sufficient, excluding the parts and oil for the field robots that tended the corn and alfalfa, and was its own little world. It was, as Quatre had told him, their hiding place from the world.

Quatre had been the easiest to find, simply because of the prominence of his family. Duo had not been surprised to find Trowa with him, but had been stunned to find out that Quatre did not know where Wufei and Heero were. Quatre had seen his disappointment, but had insisted he stay through at least Christmas, if not longer. Through at least Christmas…

 

Christmas is coming, may joy fill your home  
And the spirit be with you wherever you go  
Trees with full branches were the first ones to go  
I remember the children who came to the door  
And sang out the carols we all used to know  
Thank goodness this season will never grow old

Christmas reminded him of Maxwell Orphanage, reminded him too much of things he wanted to forget. Duo tried his best to ignore Christmas, but this time, it seemed, he could not escape it. For set up in the next room, which he tried very hard to ignore, was a large Douglas fir, trimmed to the hilt. The tree was a full eight feet, the top touching the white ceiling like the finger of a kid finally tall enough to stretch and reach something they had tried to reach before, and full formed with dark greenish blue needles and thick, saggy branches. These branches were covered with strings of white and amber lights, loops of popcorn and cranberry chains, and a myriad of ornaments.

Duo knew just how many ornaments and strings of lights there were on that damned tree, since he had helped Trowa and Quatre decorate it. And beneath its spreading boughs, presents filled the corner of the room. The smell of wrapping paper and scotch tape, and the glimmer of foil and glint of satin: all those things Duo resented.

Outside, the night had gotten darker, the moon now completely hidden by thick, rolling clouds that promised snow like a loan shark promising broken knees. If the snow stuck and stayed, it meant that Duo might not be able to leave until spring, for the roads would be completely impassable.

Especially impassable for a motorcycle, even one as large as the hulking black and chrome giant that sat in the barn now, its leather seat keeping company with the cows. Duo thought wistfully for a moment about his bike, low and heavy and mean looking, remembering building it from a rusted remain found in northern California right after the war, supplementing it with parts salvaged from the Deathscythe before they had taken her away to the museum. The noble black Gundam now stood beside the other four, and the battered remains of the Epyon as well, in the museum Relena had built for them. The leather in the seat was from the pilot's chair, the exhaust pipes chromed bits from the scythe its self, and the evil colored green turn signals taken from the Gundams eyes.

But as much as Duo longed to ride the Little Death out of this Christmas filled hell, he would not leave, not yet. Not in the night like a thief, leaving Quatre and Trowa to wonder. He would not leave as Heero had left them all, and then Wufei a day later. Neither had left word nor a single article of themselves behind, vanishing as though they had never existed at all. But Duo knew Heero had really existed, and reminded himself of that bitterly. Heero had definitely existed…

 

All round the fire, the warmth of the flame  
Tiptoeing softly trying not to awake  
The ones who lay waiting for good things you know  
Thank goodness this season will never grow old

 

So balled up into his own thoughts was Duo that he had not heard the careful footsteps on the stairs at the far end of the room. Nor had he heard them cross the carpeted floor, or heard them come to a stop behind him. Thus, when he turned away from the window, he started, breath catching, when he found Quatre standing behind him. Dressed in a long flannel housecoat, its blue, green, and black tartan vanishing into a blur of dark color in the light of the candle, Quatre looked just as startled at Duo's jump of surprise as Duo was at having been sneaked up on.

"Quatre, Jesus on a stick, you scared me." Duo said, trying to grin to cover his loss of composure.

"I'm sorry, Duo. I heard the radio on and I wanted to make sure you hadn't left it on and gone to bed." Quatre rested a hand on Duo's shoulder. "Or fallen asleep in the chair again, like you have been."

Duo shrugged. "It's a comfy chair," he lied.

Quatre glanced over at the book on the windowsill, noting the clown with evil yellow eyes on the cover, and said, "Reading those horror books still, Duo? No wonder you don't ever get any sleep. Those things give me nightmares."

Duo chuckled. "That's the point." Duo smiled his wide, fake smile, the one Quatre knew he smiled when he was hiding something.

"Duo, you really should go to bed." Quatre looked down at him with those blue eyes that could melt comet ice in a vacuum. "Let's go to the kitchen and I'll get you a glass of wine to send you to bed with, ok?"

Duo sighed. "Yeah ok, I am getting sleepy." He rose, and started to turn to follow Quatre to the kitchen when he happened to glance out the window.

It was snowing. Large, heavy flakes floated to earth amid winds that tossed them about like foam in the sea, hitting the already frost kissed ground and accumulating in small patches already. Duo watched, transfixed for a moment, and then turned away from the window to follow the retreating form of Quatre.

Christmas is coming, may joy fill your home  
And the spirit be with you wherever you go

 

And no matter how much Duo hated Christmas, and resented its trappings, there was one thing Duo loved about this time of year. Deep in his heart, Duo had always, and would always, be in love with snow.


End file.
